The Minerva Center for Human Rights Conference - Toleration, Equality and Segregation in the Name of Culture Meital

l Pinto's Paper work in progress

A New Perspective on the Rights of Minorities within Minorities

Meital Pinto Introduction While in multicultural liberal societies, cultural and religious minority groups struggle to protect their cultures against the dominant majority culture, there are minorities within the minority groups,1 such as women, gays and lesbians who wish either to change their minority culture from within or to permanently exit from it.2 They seek state protection against the minority practices which they regard as oppressive, while other members of the cultural minority group deem these practices essential for the continued survival of their culture. In this paper I will refer to such incidents as 'minorities within minorities cases'. Many existing theoretical accounts of minorities within minorities cases either essentialize culture, thus not paying enough attention to individuals interests in their freedom, or do not take seriously enough the collective interest in the survival of the cultural group.3 Moreover, they typically restrict their analysis to political philosophy, and rarely utilize philosophical theories of individual and group rights.4 My aim, therefore, is to develop a new framework for dealing with the issue of minorities within minorities, which engages with the philosophical literature on the nature and purpose of rights qua rights. There are two approaches within theories of group rights. The first approach conceptualizes the right holders as a collective agent, while the second talks in terms of individual agents who have
1

Leslie Green, Internal Minorities and Their Rights in Will Kymlicka ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (1995) 257; Avigail Eisenberg & Jeff Spinner-Halev, Introduction in Avigail Eisenberg & Jeff Spinner-Halev eds., Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Rights and Diversity (2005) 1.
2

On the right to exit see Leslie Green, Rights of Exit (1998) 4 Legal Theory 165; Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics (1995) 187; Susan Moller Okin, Mistresses of Their Own Destiny: Group Rights, Gender, and Realistic Rights of Exit (2002) 112 Ethics 205 at 206; Daniel M. Weinstock, Beyond Exit Rights: Reframing the Debates in Eisenberg & Spinner-Halev, Minorities within Minorities, ibid at 227.
3

This is the dominant framework that sees the problem in terms of balancing minorities group rights with the right to equality of minorities within minorities. It is associated with Susan Okin Moller, Martha Nussbaum, Chandran Kukathas and Jeff Spinner-Halev (see Avigail Eisenberg, Identity and Liberal Politics: The Problem of Minorities within Minorities in Eisenberg & Spinner-Halev, Minorities within Minorities, ibid 249 at 251-256).
4

Kymlicka and Shachar suggest alternative conceptions to the dominant framework, but they do not explore the issue from a philosophical perspective of rights (see Kymlickas distinction between legitimate external protection by the state on behalf of minority groups against the majority group, and illegitimate intervention by the state to support internal restrictions that protect a minority group from dissenters within the group (Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (1995) at 35-44), and Shachars joint governance approach towards religious jurisdictions. Shachar suggests giving the state and minority religious groups joint custody in the matter of religious jurisdictions instead of perceiving the issue as a dichotomy between group rights, which give ultimate power to majority members within minority groups, and equality rights that give ultimate power to the state as a protector of dissenters within the groups (Ayelet Shachar, Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights (2001) at Chapter 5 & 6)).

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The Minerva Center for Human Rights Conference - Toleration, Equality and Segregation in the Name of Culture Meital Pinto's Paper work in progress interests in a shared participatory good.5 I will adopt the second approach, which is better suited, in my view, to dealing with the problem of minorities within minorities. On the one hand, by denying a collective agent, the shared participatory interest account is compatible with methodological individualism, namely the theory that culture cannot be understood as more than the shared aims of its members,6 and thus is compatible with liberalism. On the other hand, it recognizes the collective nature of the object of the right, namely culture, and therefore requires the state to provide legal protection that is different from the protection entailed by classic individual rights. My framework differs from existing accounts in another respect as well. I explore the issue of minorities within minorities through the new prism of language rights. This issue usually arises in the context of education, in which parents wish to educate their children in the majority language to enhance their opportunities for economic prosperity and integration, while other members of the minority see education in the majority language as a possible threat to continued survival of the minority culture.7 As opposed to some existing accounts which tend to analyze the problem in clear-cut terms, and focus on extremely oppressive illiberal practices such as female circumcision, language rights allow for a more nuanced and sophisticated analysis.8 By not essentializing culture, analyzing the relevant collective right qua right, and introducing language rights cases, I will distinguish between two types of cases that prima facie call for different treatment. The first kind concerns individuals within the culture who inter alia wish to

For these two group rights approaches, see Leslie Green, Two Views of Collective Rights (1991) 4 Can. J. Law & Jur 315. These two approaches relate to a larger debate in rights philosophy about the proper account of rights as protecting the holders interests or the holders choices (see Alon Harel, Theories of Rights in Martin P. Golding & William Edmundson eds., Blackwells Guide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (2005) 191)).For the notion of participatory good protected by group rights, which develops Joseph Razs conception of public good, see Denise G. Raume, Individuals, Groups and Rights to Public Goods (1988) U. of T. L.J. 1 at 10.
6

For an overview of the debate in the philosophy of social sciences about methodological individualism versus collectivism, see Joseph Heath, Methodological Individualism, in Edward N. Zalta ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2005 Edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2005/entries/ methodological-individualism/. Joseph Agassi argues that assigning interests to a group that are not reducible to the interests of its individual members is unjustified both ontologically and normatively, from a liberal point of view (Joseph Agassi, Methodological Individualism (1960) 11 The British Journal of Sociology 244). For a discussion of this problem in the specific context of group rights, see Green, ibid at 319-320.
7

See for instance, Gosselin (Tutor of) v. Quebec (Attorney General), [2005] 1 S.C.R. 238. I will discuss this case in more details in section ______ bellow.
8

Shachar, Multicultural Jurisdictions, supra note 4 at 45-62 (for concerns regarding subordination of women within religious groups when states award jurisdictional powers to religious groups in the family law arena); for general concerns regarding the oppressive power of religious minority groups over their members, see Jacob. T. Levi, The Multiculturalism of Fear (2000) at 51-62; Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (2002) at 82-104. For an exceptional writing about minorities within minorities in the context of language rights see Alan Patten, The Rights of Internal Linguistic Minorities in Eisenberg & Spinner-Halev, Minorities within Minorities, supra note 1 135.

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The Minerva Center for Human Rights Conference - Toleration, Equality and Segregation in the Name of Culture Meital Pinto's Paper work in progress challenge some of the collective practices, values and norms of the group. Such cases are, for example, women who demand more equality and freedom in matters of representation in group religious tribunals, inheritance, custody laws and the like. If culture is not essentialized and is seen as a good common to its members, then it seems that such claims from within the group cannot be dismissed in terms of an alleged of collective interest of the group in maintaining these practices. On the other hand, in language rights cases, members of the minority within the minority typically do not seek to challenge the group practices and values as such, but to enhance other interests they have, such as economic prosperity and integration in larger society, which speaks the majority language. In such cases it seems that the interest in the participatory good shared by all of its members, i.e. the interest in language and culture, should be balanced against the other individual interests of the members of the group, i.e. their individual interest in economic prosperity. The Right to Culture A Right of a Collective Agent or a Right to a Collective Good? Claims of minority members in multicultural societies are frequently conceptualized as claims about the 'right to culture', 'group rights' or 'collective rights'. 9 For the sake of consistency and clarity, I will treat them as synonyms and call them 'claims about the right to culture'. When it comes to minorities within minorities cases, claims about the right to culture, so we are being told, are to be balanced or weighed against individual rights of vulnerable minority members such as women, children, gays and lesbians. My aim is to challenge this dichotomy. Not all minorities within minorities cases should be understood in terms of the right to culture versus individual rights of vulnerable minority members. Rather than conceptualizing them in terms of individual rights, some claims of minorities within minorities are to be understood in terms of the right to culture as well
9

See for example Michael McDonald, "Questions about Collective Rights" in David Schneiderman ed., Language and the State: The Law and Politics of Identity (Cowansville, Qubec: Editions Yvon Blais, 1991) 3; James W. Nickel, "Group Agency and Group Rights" in Ian Shapiro & Will Kymlicka eds., Ethnicity and Group Rights (New York/London: New York University Press, 1997) 235; Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, supra note Error: Reference source not found at 42; Dwight Newman, "Collective Interests and Collective Rights" (2004) 49 American Journal of Jurisprudence 127; Green two views of collective rights"; Yael Tamir, "Against Collective Rights" in Multicultural Questions, Steven Lukes and Christian Joppke (eds.,) 158; Denise Reaume, "individuals, Groups, and Rights to Public Goods" (1988) 38 U of T Law Review 1;

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The Minerva Center for Human Rights Conference - Toleration, Equality and Segregation in the Name of Culture Meital Pinto's Paper work in progress the very same one that is claimed by the majority members within the minority. In order to establish this argument I will first briefly describe two competing conception of 'the right to culture'; namely, the rights of collective agents, and the rights to collective goods. I will then explain that it is the second conception that should serve as the focal point for conceptualising the rights of minorities within minorities as this is the only conception that is generally compatible with liberalism. Under the rights of collective agents conception, a right might be considered to be a group right because it is the group, acting through its leadership, which has the legal power to invoke or waive the right. For example, a group's right to its land may be considered a group right because only the group acting through its leadership has the power to make decisions about the disposition of that land. Under the rights to collective goods conception, a right may be considered to be a group right because the interests it protects are collective or shared rather than individual. 10 The collective agents conception is distinguished by the agent who holds the right, while the collective good conception is distinguished by the interest it protects.11 There are two arguments against the rights of collective agents conception. The first is that it is problematic with respect to liberalism. In order to show that a right is a group right under the collective agents conception we have to show that the group holds the right as a collective. In other words, this right must amount to something more than the sum of the rights of its individual members. We must assume that there exists a collective group that is irreducible to its members in the sense that its welfare is independent from the welfare of each of its members. If we cannot draw a distinction between a group and its members then the right is in fact an individual right as it relates to the well-being of every individual in the group qua individual. In most cases, such a holistic approach towards a group of people seems somewhat implausible. 12 In other words, the
10 11

Leslie Green, "Two Views of Collective Rights" (1991) 4 Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 315. Ibid, at 320. 12 Ibid, at 319. Green continues and argues that even if we establish a concept of well-being of a group whose well-being is independent of the well-being of its members, it may still not be important enough to justify imposing a duty on others since it may not be of value to all the members of the group (319-320).

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The Minerva Center for Human Rights Conference - Toleration, Equality and Segregation in the Name of Culture Meital Pinto's Paper work in progress rights of collective agents conception is not compatible with methodological individualism, namely the theory that culture cannot be understood as more than the shared aims of its members,13 and thus seems incompatible with liberalism. The second argument against the conception of collective agents is the difficulty of groups to play an active role in exercising, interpreting, and defending their rights. The source of this difficulty is that groups often lack effective agency and clear identity. Effective agency is a matter of being able to form goals, deliberate, choose, intend, act, and carry out evaluation of actions taken. Groups, unlike normal individuals, are often internally divided, unorganized, unclear in their boundaries, and therefore face difficulties in engaging in actions as groups.14 The Participatory Interest that Underpins the Right to Culture The second conception of the right to culture, namely, the rights to collective goods, requires us to observe the character of the object or the interest the right protects in order to decide whether the right is to be understood as a right to culture. The question is therefore: which goods need protection through the right to culture? Denise Raume presents an account of a good that needs the protection of a right to culture by providing a definition of a special kind of good a participatory good, which can only be the object of the right to culture. There are two characteristics of a participatory good. First, a participatory good by its very nature involves activities that require many in order to produce it. Second, a participatory good is valuable only because of the joint involvement of many in it.15 It is the participatory character of the good that makes the right irreducible to the level of the individual. It is important to note, however, that Raume does not suggest a general definition of the right to culture. She does not argue that a right to culture is only a right to a participatory good, but rather that a participatory good can only be the
13

For an overview of the debate in the philosophy of social sciences about methodological individualism versus collectivism, see Joseph Heath, Methodological Individualism, in Edward N. Zalta ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2005 Edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2005/entries/ methodological-individualism/. Joseph Agassi argues that assigning interests to a group that are not reducible to the interests of its individual members is unjustified both ontologically and normatively, from a liberal point of view (Joseph Agassi, Methodological Individualism (1960) 11 The British Journal of Sociology 244). For a discussion of this problem in the specific context of group rights, see Green, ibid at 319-320.
14

This argument is also called the deficiency thesis according to which many groups and particularly ethnic groups are deficient as right holders (Nickel, supra note at 235-237). 15 Ibid, at 10.

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The Minerva Center for Human Rights Conference - Toleration, Equality and Segregation in the Name of Culture Meital Pinto's Paper work in progress object of a right to culture.16 In the same manner, it is not my intention to suggest a general definition of a right to culture. I choose Raume's definition because it is the best way to understand the right to culture without the need to delve into questions regarding the identity of the group as the holder of the right to culture. As I have explained, such endeavour takes us away from the general framework of human rights within liberalism. I will now take the conception of the right to culture depicted above as a base-line in order to distinguish between two different kinds of minorities within minorities cases. Each of them requires a different kind of legal analysis. The distinction will be illustrated by examples taken from two recent legal cases. The first case was delivered by the Canadian Supreme Court and the second was delivered by the Israeli Supreme Court. None of the decisions explicitly refer to the term 'the right to culture' or 'group rights', but both discuss claims concerning cultural practices religious, linguistic, or otherwise. In both cases, the claims were raised by minority members who wished to change or deviate from a cultural practice that is prevalent, by custom or by law, within the dominant majority of members in their minority cultural community. For the purpose of this paper, the term 'dominant majority' does not necessarily refer to greater numbers. Members within a minority group may constitute a dominant majority either by outnumbering other members of their minority group, or by having more or exclusive political and economic power than their fellow minority members. Two Different Kinds of Minorities within Minorities Cases The Beit Yaakov case17 concerns a private Jewish ultra orthodox state-recognized Girls' school in the town Immanuel. It operates under a licence from the Ministry of Education and is subsidized by the state, but is not part of the state public school system. Its name is Beit-Yaakov. The school has offered two different educational tracks: a Hassidic track and a general track.

16

Ibid, at 27. Therefore, the claim that Raume's definition to a participatory good still leaves us with public goods, which are not participatory goods but can still be the object of a group right because they are shared by a group of people, is not relevant (for this claim see Peter Jones, "Group Rights and Group Oppression" (1999) 7 The Journal of Political Philosophy 353 at 361).
17

CJ 1067/08 Noar KeHalacha Association v. Ministry of Education

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The Minerva Center for Human Rights Conference - Toleration, Equality and Segregation in the Name of Culture Meital Pinto's Paper work in progress These tracks did not only offer different curricula but also operated in different geographical spaces within the school. The Hassidic track was housed in a separate wing of the school, with a separate playground, a separate teachers room, a wall separating the two tracks and a different uniform from the one worn by girls in the general track. Seventy three percent of the girls in the Hassidic track were of Ashkenazi origin (i.e., their families came from northern European countries), whereas only twenty seven percent were of Oriental or Sephardic origin (i.e., their families came from Middle-Eastern or North African countries). In the general track only twenty three percent of the girls were of Ashkenazi origin. Not only did the Hassidic track and the general track operated in separate classrooms and separate entrances for Ashkenazi girls and Sephardic girls, but the Ashkenazi-style prayer was imposed on the few Sephardic girls who were admitted to the Hassidic track. The Independent Education Centre that operates and manages the school and is supervised by the Ministry of Education ordered the school to remove the physical separations between the two tracks and to eliminate the separate uniforms. However, the school did not comply. The petitioner - Noar KeHalacha Association - is a non-profit organization dedicated to the eradication of discriminatory policies in ultra-orthodox education. It filed a petition against what it called the "discriminatory policy" of a Beit Ya'acov girls' school in Emmanuel. The petitioner has argued that Sephardic parents are required to pay an additional monthly payment in order that their daughters may study in the Hassidic track, and bureaucratic difficulties are placed in the way of Sephardic parents who wish to register their daughters in that track. The petitioner has also emphasized that the segregation and its characteristics have left the Sephardic students and their parents feeling ostracized and humiliated. The Independent Education Centre tried to justify the separation between the two tracks by arguing that the separation was on religious, rather than ethnic grounds. It was therefore, so the

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The Minerva Center for Human Rights Conference - Toleration, Equality and Segregation in the Name of Culture Meital Pinto's Paper work in progress Independent Education Centre argued, protected by the right to religious freedom, which allows a cultural minority community to have its own educational autonomy.18 In August, 6th 2009 The Supreme Court granted the petition against the segregation of Ashkenazi and Sephardic girls at the Beit Yaakov School. Judges Edmond Levi, Hanan Meltcer and Edna Arbel ordered the school to nullify within a week all discriminatory practices and protocols that separated between Ashkenazi and Sephardic pupils. Should the school fail to carry out the order, the Education Ministry must use all the legal means at its disposal to remedy the situation, including revoking the schools license and stopping the allocation of funds to the institution, the court said.19 Although, none of the three Supreme Court judges specifically referred to the terms "'group rights", "collective rights" or "the right to culture", they all interpreted the right to denominational education (the right of various sectors to education that is consistent with their beliefs) and the right to religious freedom as manifestations of the right to culture. That is, they all rightly assumed that the right to denominational education, or the right to religious freedom, may include the right of members of a certain community to establish and operate a school that represents and reflects the lifestyle and outlook of their culture.20 The fact that the three judges understood the right to denominational education and the right to religious freedom as a manifestation of the right to culture is also evident by the numerous references to academic literature embedded in the judges' decisions regarding rights of cultural minorities within multicultural states, and the right to culture in general.21 All the three judges employed the right to equality in order to justify their decision to ban the separation between Ashkenazi and Sephardic pupils. The right to culture, so they have argued, needs to be balanced against the right to equality of the Sephardic pupils, who have been separated

18 19

Paragraph 6 of Justice Melcer's decision. Paragraph 29 of Justice Levi's decision. 20 Paragraphs 13-15, and 20 of Justice Levi's decision, Justice Arbel's decision, and paragraph 6 of Justice Melcer's decision. 21 Such references are mostly evident in Justice Melcer's decision.

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The Minerva Center for Human Rights Conference - Toleration, Equality and Segregation in the Name of Culture Meital Pinto's Paper work in progress from the Ashkenazi girls or have been forced to pray according to the Ashkenazi-style prayer.22 Because the Beit Yaakov School used, under the cloak of a cultural difference, the right to denominational education in order to deepen the discrimination in Israeli society by separating different sectors of the population on ethnic grounds, the right to equality prevails and the separation between Ashkenazi and Sephardic pupils is to be banned. Although I agree with the Supreme Court decision in this case, I think that the legal analysis it employs is inaccurate. The Sephardic girls and their parents constitute a minority group within the minority group of ultra orthodox Jews in Israel. Ashkenazi ultra orthodox clearly constitute the majority members within the ultra orthodox minority in Israel. This is evident by the fact that the Hassidic track, which is more prestigious, imposed an Ashkenazi-style prayer and that most of the girls in this track are Ashkenazi. In other words, the fact that the Hassidic track, which is associated with Ashkenazi Jews, is coveted by most members of the ultra orthodox community Ashkenazi and Sephardic - indicates that Ashkenazi Jews are perceived as more powerful within the ultra orthodox community, thus constituting the dominant majority within minority in this case. Assuming that Sephardic Jews constitute minority within a minority, their right to enter the Hassidic track should not have been conceptualized only in terms of their right to equality, but also in terms of their right to culture the very own ultra orthodox culture they share with Ashkenazi Jews. The Sephardic ultra orthodox Jews in this case wished to change the norms and values within the ultra orthodox minority culture, so that it would include and reflect not only the dominant Ashkenazi image but also the Sephardic one. If the right to culture is perceived as a right that protects a participatory good that is produced and enjoyed by all minority members, it means that they all should have equal opportunity to shape the cultural norms, values and practices that they
22

Paragraph 15 of Justice Levi's decision. Justice Melcer has emphasised that the discrimination against the Sephardic girls in this case amounts to a violation of their right to dignity (paragraphs 2-3). Finding the right balance between the minority within the minority members right to equality and the majority within the minority members right to culture is also prevalent among political theorists. It is called the dominant or judicial framework, and is associated with Susan Okin, Martha Nussbaum, Chandran Kukathas and Jeff Spinner-Halev (for an account of the dominant framework see Eisenberg, ibid. at 251-256. Anne Phillips perceives the framework that balances the right to culture and the right to equality as the judicial approach (Anne Phillips, Dilemmas of Gender and Culture: The Judge, the Democrat and the Political Activist in Eisenberg & Spinner-Halev, Minorities within Minorities, supra note 113 at 115).

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The Minerva Center for Human Rights Conference - Toleration, Equality and Segregation in the Name of Culture Meital Pinto's Paper work in progress share. The equal opportunity the petitioners ask is not external to the right to culture, and therefore should not be balanced against it. In other words, the right to culture protects the petitioners inasmuch as it protects the respondents. It therefore should not be employed against the petitioners' right to equality because the minority culture it protects belongs to the petitioners inasmuch as it belongs to the respondents. I will now contrast the Israeli Beit Yaakov case with the Canadian Gosselin case in order to point out a different kind of minorities within minorities' instances, which to my mind, should be analysed in terms of finding the proper balance between the majority-within-the-minority's right to culture versus external rights of minorities-within-the-minority members. The Gosselin case23 concerns the constitutionality of s. 73 of the 1993 Quebec French Language Charter, according to which, only children whose parents received instruction at the primary grades in English anywhere in Canada, or children who have or are receiving English language instruction in Canada, are eligible to attend public schools in Quebec in the English language. That is, except for limited exceptions, s. 73 of the Quebec French Language severely limits the eligibility of Francophone children to attend English speaking public schools in Quebec. Most of the appellants in Gosselin were Francophone parents who were born in Quebec and received their instruction in French in Quebec. Some of them did not meet the criteria that qualify their children to be eligible for public education in English, while the others sought admission for their children to English language schools through the administrative remedies provided under s. 73 but did not succeed. The appellants claimed that s. 73 discriminates between children who qualify to education in the English language and the majority of French-speaking Quebec children who do not, and violates the right to equality guaranteed at ss. 10 and 12 of the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, and s. 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Equality requires, so the appellants argue, that all children in Quebec be given access to publicly funded English language
23

Gosselin (Tutor of) v. Quebec (Attorney General), [2005] 1 S.C.R. 238.

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The Minerva Center for Human Rights Conference - Toleration, Equality and Segregation in the Name of Culture Meital Pinto's Paper work in progress education if they wish so. As members of the French language majority in Quebec, they seek to use the right to equality to access a right guaranteed in Quebec only to the English language minority. Both the Superior Court of Quebec and Quebec Court of Appeal dismissed their claims.24 Although Francophones make up the majority in Quebec, they are also part of a larger minority group within Canada. Therefore, in my view Gosselin illustrates the problem of minorities within minorities. The Supreme Court of Canada has defined its task as measuring "the constitutional right to minority language education against the right to equality".25 The court decided to dismiss the appellants' claim. It stressed that the appellants' objective in having their children educated in English simply did not fall within the purpose of s. 23, which aims to make sure schools for the minority language community will "not operate to undermine the desire of the majority to protect and enhance French as the majority language in Quebec, knowing that it will remain the minority language in the broader context of Canada as a whole".26 The right to minority language education is a manifestation of the right to culture, which protects members of the Francophone minority in Canada. The right to equality concerns a group of individuals within the Francophone minority, who have asked the court to give their children an equal opportunity to receive education in English. In other words, the court understood its role as measuring or balancing the right to culture of a minority (the Francophone minority) against the right to equality of minority within a minority (Francophone minority members who wish to be educated in English). Was the Canadian Supreme Court right in this legal analysis? In my view, the answer is positive. By contrast to the Beit Yaakov case, in Gosselin, the minority members within the Francophone minority group in Quebec did not ask to revise the norms and values of their minority culture. Rather, they asked the court to intervene on behalf of an external interest they have in

24 25

Quebec Superior Court, [2000] R.J.Q. 2973; Quebec Court of Appeal, [2002] R.J.Q. 1298. Paragraph 1. 26 Paragraph 31.

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The Minerva Center for Human Rights Conference - Toleration, Equality and Segregation in the Name of Culture Meital Pinto's Paper work in progress enhancing the economic prosperity of their children by giving them the option to be educated in English. Conclusion In this paper I have argued that not all cases of minorities within minorities should be perceived in terms of the dichotomy between the right to culture and the right to equality. Rather, a careful attention should be drawn to the special characteristics of the right to culture as such. The right to culture is a group right (or a collective right) that is defined in the philosophical literature as a right that protects a participatory good (culture) that is produced and enjoyed collectively by all minority members. It therefore cannot be invoked in order to exclude vulnerable minority members who have an equal share in producing and enjoying the good that the right to culture protects. I have illustrated my argument by drawing a comparison between the Israeli Beit Yaacov case and the Canadian Gosslin case. Both cases deal with the claims on behalf of students who belong to the minority within minority to ban educational practices that separate them from students who belong to majority within the minority. In both cases, the court considered two opposing rights the right to culture of members of the majority within the minority and the right to equality of members of the minority within the minority. I have argued that this analysis is correct in the Gosslin case, in which members of the minority within minority appealed to the interests they have qua individuals in receiving education that enhances their prospects of economic success. By contrast, while I agree with the outcome of the case, this analysis is incorrect in the Beit Yaacov case, which should be perceived as a case in which members of a group asked for the right to challenge the prevailing discriminatory practices within their own culture. Because culture cannot be taken to be more than the sum of its members, the Israeli Supreme Court wrongly associated the Hassidic culture with the dominant majority in it, neglecting to realize that the culture, as a participatory good, equally belongs to the vulnerable members of the group.

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